UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I need to sort all the files in a directory whilst retaining the originals. So if in the directory I have:

File1
File2
File3

I want to sort these files so that I would have:

File1
File1.sort
File2
File2.sort
File3
File3.sort

where I have added the .sort extension to show the sorted version.

I would use the command sort File1 > File1.sort to sort an individual file but how do I do it so that it sorts every file in the directory. I tried using sed but got in a bit of a mess.

Thanks!

-Gary

You can do something like:

Code:

ls |grep -v .sort| while read file
do
  sort "$file" > "$file".sort
done

Regards

Thanks this is good! Is there a way to make it ignore directories and only attempt to sort files?

Use find instead of ls:

Code:

find <dir> -type f -prune

The -prune option tells find to search only in the current directory.
You can use it if your find version don't support the maxdept option.

Regards

Thanks!

Got it working the way I need now. Final version is

Code:

 
find * -prune -type f |grep -v .sort| while read file
do
sort "$file" > "$file".sort
done

I had to put the -prune option before the -type or it didn't seem to work on my system.